Led to convert an intended Voyage to Orkney into a Journey to
England.— Objects of the Journey.—Carter Fell. — The Border Line. — Well for
England it should have been so doggedly maintained by the weaker Country. —
Otterburn. — The Mountain Limestone in England, what it is not in Scotland,
a true Mountain Limestone. — Scenery changes as we enter the Coal Measures.
— Wretched Weather. — Newcastle.— Methodists. — Controversy on the
Atonement. — The Popular Mind in Scotland mainly developed by its Theology.
— Newcastle Museum ; rich in its Geology and its Antiquities ; both branches
of one subject. — Geologic History of the Roman Invasion. — Durham
Cathedral.—The Monuments of Nature greatly more enduring than those of Man.—Cyo* thophyllum
Fungites. — The Spotted Tubers, and what they indicated.— The Destiny of a
Nation involved in the Growth of a minute Fungus.

I had purposed visiting the Orkneys, and spending my few
weeks of autumn leisure in exploring the. Old Red Sandstone of these islands
along the noble coast sections opened up by the sea. My vacations during the
five previous seasons had been devoted to an examination of the
fossiliferous deposits of Scotland. I had already in some degree acquainted
myself with the Palaeozoic and Secondary formations of the northern half of
the kingdom and the Hebrides. One vacation more would have acquainted me
with those of Orkney also, and completed my survey of Scotland to the north
of the Grampians; and 1 would have reckoned at least half my self-imposed
task at an end. When laboring professionally, however, during the previous
winter and spring, I had, I am afraid, sometimes failed to remember, what
the old chivalric knights used never to forget, that “ man is hut of mould;
” and I had, in consequence, subjected the “mould” to a heavier pressure
than, from its yielding nature, it is suited to bear. And now that play-time
had once more come round, I found I had scarce health and strength enough
left me to carry me in quest of more. I could no longer undertake, as
formerly, long journeys a-foot in a wild country, nor scramble, with sure
step, and head that never failed, along the faces of tall precipices washed
by the sea. And so, for the time at least, I had to give up all thought of
visiting Orkney.

“I will cross the Border,” I said, “and get into England. I
know the humbler Scotch better than most men, — I have at least enjoyed
better opportunities of knowing them; but the humbler English I know only
from hearsay. I will go and live among them for a few weeks, somewhere in
the midland districts. I shall lodge in humble cottages, wear a humble
dress, and see what is to be seen by humble men only,— society without its
mask. I shall explore, too, for myself, the formations wanting in the
geologic scale of Scotland, — the Silurian, the Chalk, and the Tertiary; and
so, should there be future years in store for me, I shall be enabled to
resume my survey of our Scottish deposits with a more practised eye
than at present, and with more extended knowledge.” August was dragging on
to its close through a moist and cloudy atmosphere ; every day had its
shower, and some days half a dozen: but I hoped for clearer skies and fairer
weather in the south; and so, taking my seat at Edinburgh on the top of the
Newcastle coach, I crossed Carter Fell a little after mid-day, and found
myself, for the first time, in England. The sun on the Scottish side looked
down clear and kindly on languid fields surcharged with moisture, that
exhibited greener and yet greener tints as we ascended from the lowland
districts to the uplands; while on the southern side, though all was fair in
the foreground, a thick sullen cloud hung low over the distant prospect,
resembling the smoke of some vast city.

And this was the famous Border-line, made good by the weaker
against the stronger nation, — at how vast an amount of blood and suffering!
— for more than a thousand years. It wore to-day, in the quiet sunshine, a
look of recluse tranquillity, that seemed wholly unconscious of the past. A
tumbling sea of dark-green hills, delicately checkered with light and
shadow, swelled upwards on either side towards the line of boundary, like
the billows of opposing tide-ways, that rise over the general level where
the currents meet; and passing on and away from wave-top to wave-top, like
the cork baulk of a fisherman’s net afloat on the swell, ran the separating
line. But all was still and motionless, as in the upper reaches of the
Baltic, when the winter frost has set in. We passed, on the Scottish side, a
group of stalwart shepherds, — solid, grave-featured men, who certainly did
not look as if they loved fighting for its own sake; and on the English
side, drove by a few stout, ruddy hinds, engaged in driving carts, who
seemed just as little quarrelsome as their Scottish neighbors. War must be
intrinsically mischievous. It must be something very bad, let us personify
it as proudly as we may, that could have set on these useful, peaceable
people, — cast in so nearly the same mould, speaking the same tongue,
possessed of the same common nature, lovable, doubtless, in some points,
from the development of the same genial affections, — to knock one another
on the head, simply because the one half of' them had first seen the light
on the one side of the hill, and the other half on the other side. And yet,
such was the state of things which obtained in this wild district for many
hundred years. It seems, however, especially well for England, since the
quarrel began at all, that it should have been so doggedly maintained by the
weaker people, — so well maintained that the border hamlet, round which they
struggled, in the days of the first Edward, as a piece of doubtful property,
is a piece of doubtful property still, and has, in royal proclamation and
act of Parliament, its own separate clause assigned to it, as the “ town
called Berwick-upon-Tweed.” It is quite enough for the English, as shown by
the political history of modem times, that they conquered Ireland; had they
conquered Scotland also, they would have been ruined utterly. “One such
victory more, and they would have been undone.” Men have long suspected the
trade of the hero to be a bad one; but it is only now they are fairly
beginning to learn, that of all great losses and misfortunes, his master
achievement — the taking of a nation — is the greatest and most incurably
calamitous.

The line of boundary forms the water-shed in this part of the
island: the streams on the Scottish side trot away northwards toward the
valley of the Tweed; while on the English side they pursue a southerly
course, and are included in the drainage of the Tyne. The stream which runs
along the bare, open valley on which we had now entered, forms one of the
larger tributaries of the latter river. But everything seemed as Scottish as
ever, — the people, the dwelling-houses, the country. I could scarce realize
the fact, that the little gray parish-church, with the square tower, which
we had just passed; was a church in which the curate read the Prayer-book
every Sunday, and that I had left behind me the Scottish law, under which I
had been living all life-long till now, on the top of the hill. I had proof,
however, at our first English stage, that such was actually the case. “Is
all right?” asked the coachman, of a tall, lanky Northumbrian, who had
busied himself in changing the horses. “Yez, all roit,” was the reply; “roit
as the Church of England.” I was, it was evident, on Presbyterian ground no
longer.

We passed, as the country began to open, a spot marked by two
of the crossed swords of our more elaborate maps: they lie thick on both
sides the Border, to indicate where the old battle-fields were stricken; and
the crossed swords of this especial locality are celebrated in chronicle and
song. A rude, straggling village runs for some one or two hundred yards
along both sides of the road. On the left there is a group of tall trees,
elevated on a ridge, which they conceal; and a bare, undulating, somewhat
wild country, spreads around. All is quiet and solitary; and no scathe on
the landscape corresponds with the crossed swords on the map. There were a
few children at play, as we passed, in front of one of the cottages, and two
old men sauntering along the road. And such now is Otterburn, — a name I had
never associated before, save with the two noble ditties of Chevy Chase, the
magnificent narrative of Froissart, and the common subject of both ballads
and narrative, however various their descriptions of it, — that one stern
night’s slaughter, four hundred years ago,

“When the dead Douglas won the field.”

It was well for the poor victors they had a Froissart to
celebrate them. For though it was the Scotch who gained the battle, it was
the English who had the writing of the songs; and had not the victors found
so impartial a chronicler in the generous Frenchman, the two songs, each a
model in its own department, would have proved greatly an overmatch for them
in the end.

The wilder tracts of Northumberland are composed of the
Millstone Grit and Mountain Limestone; and never before had I seen this
latter deposit developed in a style that so bears out the appropriateness of
its name. It is in Northumberland, what it is rarely or never in Scotland, a
true Mountain Limestone, that rises into tall hills, and sinks into deep
valleys, and spreads laterally over a vast extent of area. The ocean of the
Carboniferous era in England must have been greatly more persistent and
extended than the ocean whose deposits form the base of the Coal Measures in
the sister country: it appears to have lain further from the contemporary
land, and to have been much less the subject of alternate upheavals and
depressions. We were several hours in driving over the formation. As we
entered upon the true Coal Measures, the face of the country at once
altered: the wild, open, undulating surface sunk into a plain, laid out, far
as the eye could reach, into fields closely reticulated with hedge-rows; the
farm-houses and gentlemen’s seats thickened as we advanced; and England
assumed its proper character. With a change of scenery, however, we
experienced a change of weather. We had entered into the cloud that seemed
so threatening in the distance from the top of Carter Fell; and a thick,
soaking rain, without wind, accompanied by a lazy fog that lay scattered
along the fields and woods in detached wreaths of gray, saddened the
landscape. As we drove on, we could see the dense smoke of the pit-engines
forming a new feature in the prospect; the tall chimneys of Newcastle, that
seemed so many soot-black obelisks, half lost in the turbid atmosphere, came
next in view; and then, just as the evening was falling wet and cheerless,
we entered the town, through muddy streets, and along ranges of
melancholy-looking houses, dropping from all their eaves, and darkened by
the continuous rain of weeks. I was directed by the coachman to by far the
most splendid temperance coffeehouse I had ever seen ; but it seemed too
fine a lodging-house for harboring the more characteristic English, and I
had not crossed the Border to see cosmopolites; and so, turning away from
the door, I succeeded in finding for myself a humbler, but still very
respectable house, in a different part of the town.

There w’ere several guests in the public room : some two or
three smart commercial gentlemen from the midland trading towns; two young
Sheffield mechanics, evidently of the respectable class, who earn high wages
and take care of them; and a farmer or two from the country. In the course
of the evening we had a good deal of conversation, and some controversy. The
mechanics were Methodists, who had availed themselves of a few days’ leisure
to see the north country, but more especially, as I afterwards learned, to
be present at a discussion on controverted points of theology, which was to
take place in Newcastle on the following evening, between a prodigiously
clever preacher of the . very unsound in his creed, of whom I had
never heard before, and a more orthodox preacher of the same body, profound
in his theology, of whom I had heard just as little. From the peculiar
emphasis placed by the two lads on the word , I inferred that neither
of them deemed orthodoxy so intellectual a thing as the want of it; and I
ultimately discovered that they were partisans of the clever preacher. One
of the two seemed anxious to provoke a controversy on his favorite points;
but the commercial men, who appeared rather amused to hear so much about
religion, avoided all definite statement; and the men from the country said
nothing. A person in black entered the room, — not a preacher apparently,
but, had I met him in Scotland, I would have set him down for at least an
elder; and the young mechanics were gratified.

The man in black was, I found, a Calvinist, — not, however,
of the most profound type; the Methodists were wild nondescripts in their
theology, more Socinian than aught else, and yet not consistently Socinian
neither. A Scottish religious controversy of the present time regards
the nature and extent of the atonement; the two Wesleyans challenged, I
found, the very existence of the doctrine. There was really no such thing as
an atonement, they said; the atonement was a mere orthodox view taken by
the Old Connection. The Calvinist referred to the ordinary evidences to
prove it something more; and so the controversy went on, with some share of
perverted ingenuity on the one side, and a considerable acquaintance with
Scripture doctrine on the other. A tall, respectable-looking man, with the
freshness of a country life palpable about him, had come in shortly after
the commencement of the discussion, and took evidently some interest in it.
He turned from speaker to speaker, and seemed employed in weighing the
statements on both sides. At length he struck in, taking part against the
Calvinist. “Can it really be held,” he said, “ that the all-powerful God —
the Being who has no limits to his power—could not forgive sin without an
atonement? That would be limiting his illimitable power with a vengeance! ”
The remark would scarcely have arrested a theologic controversy on the same
nice point in Scotland,—certainly not among the class of peasant
controversialists so unwisely satirized by Burns, nor yet among the class
who, in our own times, have taken so deep an interest in the Church
question; but the English Calvinist seemed unfurnished with a reply.

I was curious to see how the metaphysics of our Scotch
Calvinism would tell on such an audience; and took up the subject much in
the way it might be taken up in some country church-yard, ere the congregat
ion had fully gathered, by some of the “grave-livers” of the parish, or as
it might be discussed in the more northern localities of the kingdom, at
some evening meeting of “the men.” I attempted showing, step by step, that
God did not give to himself his own nature, nor any part of it; that it
exists as it is, as independently of his will as our human nature exists as
it is independently of ours; that his moral nature, like his nature in
general, is underived, unalterable, eternal; and that it is this underived
moral nature of the Godhead which forms the absolute law of his conduct in
all his dealings with his moral agents. “You are, I daresay, right,” said
the countryman; “but how does all this bear on the doctrine of the
atonement?”

“Very directly on your remark respecting it,” I replied. “It
shows us that the will and power of God, in dealing with the sins of his
accountable creature, man, cannot, if we may so speak, be arbitrary,
unregulated power and will, but must spring, of necessity, out of his
underived moral nature. If it be according to this moral nature, which
constitutes the governing law of Deity, — the law which controls Deity, —
that without the ‘ shedding of blood there can be no remission,’ then blood
must be shed, or remission cannot be obtained; atonement for sin there must
be. If, on the contrary, there can be remission without the shedding of
blood, we may be infallibly certain the unnecessary blood will not be
demanded, nor the superfluous atonement required. To believe otherwise would
be to believe that God deals with his moral agent, man, on principles that
do not spring out of his own moral nature, but are mere arbitrary results of
an unregulated will.”—“But are you not leaving the question, after all, just
where you found it?” asked the countryman. — “Not quite,” I replied: “of
God’s moral nature, or the conduct which springs out of it, we can but know
what God has been pleased to tell us: the fact of the atonement can be
determined but by revelation; and I believe, with the gentleman opposite,
that revelation determines it very conclusively. But if fact it be, then
must we hold that it is a fact which springs directly out of that underived
moral nature of God which constitutes the governing law of his power and
will; and that, his nature being what it is, the antagonist fact of
remission without atonement is in reality an impossibility. Your appeal in
the question lay to the omnipotence of God; it is something to know that in
that direction there can lie noappeal. Mark how strongly your own great poet
brings out this truth. In his statement of the doctrine of the atonement, —
a simple digest of the Scriptural statement, — all is made to hinge on the
important fact, that God having once willed the salvation of men, an
atonement became as essentially necessary to Him, in order that the moral
nature which He did not give himself might not be violated, as to the lapsed
race, who might recognize in it their sole hope of restoration and recovery.
Man, says the poet,

‘To expiate his treason hath nought left,
But to destruction, sacred and devote,
He, with his whole posterity, must die :
Die he, or justice must; unless for him
Some other, able, and as willing, pay
The rigid satisfaction, death for death.”

The countryman was silent. “You Scotch are a strange people,”
said one of the commercial gentlemen. “When I was in Scotland two years ago,
I could hear of scarce anything among you but your Church question. What
good does all your theology do you?”—“Independently altogether of religious
considerations,” I replied, “it has done for our people what all your
Societies for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and all your Penny and
Saturday Magazines, will never do for yours; it has awakened their
intellects, and taught them how to think. The development of the popular
mind in Scotland is a result of its theology.”

The morning rose quite as gloomily as the evening had fallen:
the mist cloud still rested lazily over the town; the rain dashed
incessantly from the eaves, and streamed along the pavement. It was
miserable weather for an invalid in quest of health; but I had just to make
the best I could of the circumstances, by scraping acquaintance with the
guests in the travellers’ room, and beating with them over all manner of
topics, until mid-day, when I sallied out, under cover of an umbrella, to
see the town museum. I found it well suited to repay the trouble of a visit;
and such is the liberality of the Newcastle people, that it cost me no more.
It is superior, both in the extent and arrangement of its geologic
department, to any of our Scotch collections with which I am acquainted; and
its Anglo-Roman antiquities, from the proximity of the place to the wall of
Hadrian, are greatly more numerous than in any other museum I ever saw, —
filling, of themselves, an entire gallery. As I passed, in the geologic
apartment, from the older Silurian to the newer Tertiary, and then on from
the newer Tertiary to the votive tablets, sacrificial altars, and sepulchral
memorials of the Anglo-Roman gallery, I could not help regarding them as all
belonging to one department. The antiquities piece "on in natural sequence
to the geology; and it seems but rational to indulge in the same sort of
reasonings regarding them. They are the fossils of an extinct order of
things, newer than the Tertiary, — of an extinct race, — of an extinct
religion, — of a state of society and a class of enterprises which the world
saw once, but which it will never see again. And with but little assistance
from the direct testimony of history, one has to grope one’s way along this
comparatively modern formation, guided chiefly, as in the more ancient
deposits, by the clue of circumstantial evidence. In at least its leading
features, however, the story embodied is remarkably clear. First, we have
evidence that in those remote times, when the northern half of the island
had just become a home of men, the land was forest-covered, like the woody
regions of North America, and that its inhabitants were rude savages,
unacquainted with the metals, but possessed of a few curious arts which an
after age forgot, — not devoid of a religion which at least indicated the
immortality of the soul,—and much given to war. The extensive morass, in
which huge trunks lie thick and frequent,— the stone battle-axe, — the flint
arrow-head,— the Druidic circle, — the vitrified fort, — the Picts’ house,—
the canoe hollowed out of a single log, — are all fossils of this early
period. Then come the memorials of an after formation. This wild country is
invaded by a much more civilized race han the one by which it is inhabited;
we find distinct marks )f their lines of march, — of the forests which they
cut down, — of the encampments in which they intrenched themselves,— of the
battle-fields in which they were met in fight by the natives. And they, too,
had their religion. More than half the remains which testify to their
progress consist of sacrificial altars, and votive tablets dedicated to the
gods. The narrative goes on : another class of remains show us that a
portion of the country was conquered by the civilized race. We find the
remains of tesselated pavements, baths, public roads, the foundations of
houses and temples, accumulations of broken pottery, and hoards of coin.
Then comes another important clause in the story; we ascertain that the
civilized people failed to conquer the whole of the northern country; and
that, in order to preserve what they had conquered, they were content to
construct, at an immense expense of labor, a long chain of forts, connected
by a strong wall flanked with towers. Had it been easier to conquer the rest
of the country than to build the wall, the wall would not have been built.
We learn further, however, that the laboriously-built wall served its
purpose but for a time : the wild people beyond at length broke over it; and
the civilized invader, wearied out by their persevering assaults, which,
though repelled to-day, had again to be repelled to-morrow, at length left
their country to them entire, and retreating beyond its furthest limits,
built for his protection a second wall. Such is the history of this bygone
series of occurrences, as written, if one may so speak, in the various
fossils of the formation. The antiquities of a museum should always piece on
to its geologic collection.*

*Some of the operations of the Romans in Scotland have, like
the catastrophes of the old geologic periods, left permanent marks on the
face of the country. It is a curious fact, that not a few of our southern
Scottish mosses owe their origin to the Roman invasion. Of their lower tiers
of trees, — those which constituted the nucleus of the peaty formation,—
many have been found still bearing the marks of the Roman hatchet, — a
thin-edged tool, somewhat like that of the American woodsman, but still
narrower. In some instances the axe-head, sorely wasted, has been detected
still sticking in the buried stump, which is generally found to have been
cut several feet over the soil, just where the tool might be plied with most
effect; and in many, Roman utensils and coins have been discovered, where
they had been hastily laid down by the soldiery among the tangled brushwood,
and forthwith covered up and lost. Rennie, in his “Essay on Peat Moss,”
furnishes an interesting list of these curiosities, that tell so significant
a story. “In Ponsil Moss, near Glasgow,” he says, “a leather bag, containing
about two hundred silver coins of Rome, was found; in Dundaff Moor, a number
of similar coins were found about forty years ago; in Annan Moss, near the
Roman Causeway, an ornament of pure gold was discovered; a Roman camp-kettle
was found, eight feet deep, under a moss, on the estate of Ochtertyre; in
Planders Moss a similar utensil was found; a Roman jug was found in Locker
Moss, Dum.

The weather was still wretchedly bad; but I got upon the
Great Southern Railway, and passed on to Durham, expecting to see, in the
city of a bishop, a quiet English town of the true ancient type. And so I
would have done, as the close-piled tenements of antique brick-work, with
their secluded old-fashioned courts and tall fantastic gables, testified in
detail, had the circumstances been more favorable; but the mist-cloud hung
low, and I could see little else than dropping eaves, dark ened walls, and
streaming pavements. The river which sweeps past the town was big in flood.
I crossed along the bridge; saw beyond, a half-drowned country, rich
in-fields and woods, and varied by the reaches of the stream; and caught
between me and the sky, when the fog rose, the outline of the town on its
bold ridge, with its stately cathedral elevated highest, as first in place,
and its grotesque piles of brick ranging adown the slope in picturesque
groups, continuous yet distinct. I next visited the cathedral. The gloomy
day was darkening into still gloomier evening, and I found the huge pile
standing up amid the descending torrents in its ancient grave-yard, like
some mass of fretted rock-work enveloped in the play of a fountain. The
great door lay open, but I could see little else within than the ranges of
antique columns, curiously moulded, friesshire; a pot and decanter, of Roman
copper, was found in a moss in Kirkmichael parish in the same county; and
two vessels, of Roman bronze, in the Moss of Glanderhill, in Strathaven.”
And thus the list runs on. It is not difficult to conceive how, in the
circumstances, mosses came to be formed. The felled wood was left to rot on
the surface; small streams were choked up in the levels; pools formed in the
hollows; the soil beneath, shut up from the light and the air, became
unfitted to produce its former vegetation: but a new order of plants, — the
thick water-mosses, — began to spring up; one generation budded and decayed
over the ruins of another; and what had been an overturned forest, became,
in the course of years, a deep morass, — an unsightly but permanent monument
of the formidable invader. and of girth enormous, that separate the aisles
from the nave; and, half lost in the blackness, they served to remind me
this evening of the shadowy, gigantic colonnades of Martin. Their Saxon
strength wore, amid the vagueness of the gloom, an air of Babylonish
magnificence.

The rain was dashing amid the tombstones outside. One antique
slab of blue limestone beside the pathway had been fretted many centuries
ago into the rude semblance of a human figure; but the compact mass,
unfaithful to its charge, had resigned all save the general outline; the
face was worn smooth, and only a few nearly obliterated ridges remained, to
indicate the foldings of the robe. It served to show, in a manner
sufficiently striking, how much more indelibly nature inscribes her
monuments of the dead than art. The limestone slab had existed as a
churchyard • monument for perhaps a thousand years; but the story which it
had been sculptured to tell had been long since told for the last time ; and
whether it had marked out the burial-place of priest or of layman, or what
he had been or done, no one could now determine. But the story of an
immensely earlier sepulture, — earlier, mayhap, by thrice as many
twelvemonths as the thousand years contained days, — it continued to tell
most distinctly. It told that when it had existed as a calcareous mud deep
in the carboniferous ocean, a species of curious zoophyte, long afterwards
termed Cyathophyllum fungites, were living and dying by myriads; and it now
exhibited on its surface several dozens of them, cut open at every possible
angle, and presenting every variety of section, as if to show what sort of
creatures they had been. The glossy wet served as a varnish; and I could see
that not only had those larger plates of the skeletons that radiate outwards
from the centre been preserved, but even the microscopic reticulations of
the cross partitioning. Never was there ancient inscription held in such
faithful keeping by the founder’s bronze or the sculptor’s marble; and never
was there epitaph of human composition so scrupulously just to the real
character of the dead.

I found three guests in the coffee-house in which I lodged,—
a farmer and his two sons: the farmer still in vigorous middle life; the
sons robust and tall; all of them fine specimens of the ruddy, well-built,
square-shouldered Englishman. They had been travelling by the railway, and
were now on their return to their farm, which lay little more than two
hours’ walk away, but so bad was the evening, that they had deemed it
advisable to take beds for the night in Durham. They had evidently a stake
in the state of the weather; and as the rain ever and anon pattered against
the panes, as if on the eve of breaking them, some one or other of the three
would rise to the window, and look moodily out into the storm. “God help
us!” I heard the old farmer ejaculate, as the rising wind shook the
casement; “we shall have no harvest at all.” They had had rain, I learned,
in this locality, with but partial intermissions, for the greater part of
six weeks, and the crops lay rotting on the ground. In the potatoes served
at table I marked a peculiar appearance : they were freckled over by minute
circular spots, that bore a ferruginous tinge, somewhat resembling the
specks on iron-shot sandstone, and they ate as if but partially boiled. I
asked the farmer whether the affection was a common one in that part of the
country. “Not at all,” was the reply: “we never saw it before; but it
threatens this year to destroy our potatoes. The half of mine it has spoiled
already, and it spreads among them every day.” It does not seem natural to
the species to associate mighty consequences with phenomena that wear a very
humble aspect. The teachings of experience are essentially necessary to show
us that the seeds of great events may be little things in themselves; and so
I could not see how important a part these minute iron-tinted specks — the
work of a microscopic fungus — were to enact in 'British history. The old
soothsayers professed to read the destinies of the future in very unlikely
pages, — in the meteoric appearances of the heavens, and in the stars, — in
the flight and chirping of birds, — in the entrails of animals, — in many
other strange characters besides; and in the remoter districts of my own
country I have seen a half-sportive superstition employed in deciphering
characters quite as unlikely as those of the old augurs, — in the burning of
a brace of hazel-nuts, — in the pulling of a few oaten stalks, — in the
grounds of a tea-cup, — above all, in the Hallowe’en egg, in which, in a
different sense from that embodied in the allegory of Cowley,

“The curious eye,
Through the firm shell and the thick white may spy
Years to come a-forming lie,
Close in their sacred secundine asleep."

But who could have ever thought of divining over the spotted
tubers ? or who so shrewd as to have seen in the grouping of their iron-shot
specks Lord John Russell’s renunciation of the fixed duty, — the conversion
to free-trade principles of Sir Robert Peel and his Conservative ministry, —
the breaking up into sections of the old Protectionist party, — and, in the
remote distance, the abolition in Scotland of the law of entail, and in
England the ultimate abandonment, mayhap, of the depressing tenant-at-will
system? If one could have read them aright, never did the flight of bird or
the embowelment of beast indicate so wonderful a story as these same
iron-shot tubers.

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